Oehlen, Pendleton, Pope.L, Sillman

One of the most respected painters today, Albert Oehlen (b. 1954) constantly questions the methods and means of painting to raise a sense of awareness of the medium, which he aims to reinvent and to reshape, always in opposition to traditional hierarchies. Albert Oehlen has been continually colliding various styles, orders or mediums since the 80’s, expanding the notion of painting to ‘what he wants to see’.

‘Albert Oehlen long ago constructed the possibility of his own painting. Yet at the beginning the road seemed not merely a narrow alley, it looked like a dead end. What then? Give up and turn back? Or take a hammer and drive a tunnel through the solid amorphous mass before him? Albert Oehlen was one of the very few to take up that hammer. And when he started he struck mighty blows. It was in materials, expression, history and genre – in everything his immediate predecessors had progressively demolished with their hammers – that Oehlen stated his determination not to give in. His possibility of painting had to be built from the foundations. No gratuitous transgressions, no irony or cynicism – even if it is true that some used these terms to disparage his efforts to be free of artistic propriety. Instead Oehlen went looking where nobody else did, plunging into the piles of detritus abandoned by the wayside of an era. Then a final task remained: that of interweaving painting as history with the position of the painter and with the society out of which both painting and painter emerge in order to reflect on it.’

Anne Pontégnie, The history of abstraction seemed to be finished in Albert Oehlen, Galerie Max Hetzler and Holzwarth Publications, 2011

Spanning painting, performance, video and writing, Adam Pendleton’s (b. 1984) practice is profoundly eclectic and critical. The artist engages with problematics inherent to mechanisms of representation, delving into language, abstraction and the notion of ‘blackness’. Working predominantly in black and white, Pendleton unpicks and deconstructs dominant historical, political, socio-cultural and aesthetic discourses, putting forward alternative narratives. Within his own concept of ‘Black Dada’, the artist investigates the past in order to ‘imagine alternate presents’. Relying on appropriation, Pendleton creates works merge references ranging from Dadaism to the Black Arts Movement.

‘Pendleton is a rare artist in his ability to synthesise disciplines and mediums, and to steer with collaborators towards “total works”, which yet remain drafts of a larger essayistic practice. His works — like those of his many avant-garde forebears—are experimental in the truest sense. He sets up a laboratory in which our social and political desires can appear, however fleetingly. Historical materials (images, sounds, and printed language) become a point of departure for making present what cannot be grasped by representations of history (narratives, archives): the emergence of events and situations, which can only become known retroactively. Recent live art has rarely been more conscious of its origins in civil disobedience and the civil rights movement, where we view the body as a site of social antagonism, and as a “case” for struggles for recognition and justice. With Pendleton’s work, even though we are often left with aporias and blind spots, we feel the force of historical matter self-organizing and finding form beyond representability and essence. We discover the protest of the object—works of art and performance resisting their subsumption by common epistemological frameworks and modes of narration posing as truth.’

T. Donovan, ‘Adam Pendleton’, in BOMB Magazine, 2011